Here is a Sunday special by one of my favorite writers, Greg Olear.

Please open and read to the end. He takes the topic and relates it to the present moment, when many of us fear that our republic is in mortal danger, as fascism swirls around us.

He writes:

Dear Reader,

A Shropshire Lad is a collection of 63 short poems, written in London by a classics scholar who had never once been to Shropshire, involving young men living, working, drinking, wooing, ruing, philosophizing, and dying in the British countryside. The narrator of most of the poems, the titular “lad of Shropshire,” is called Terence, who sometimes is, and sometimes is not, a stand-in for the actual author, A.E. Housman.

The book was published in 1896, when Housman was 37 years old, and did not exactly fly off the shelves. But many of the poems touch on the theme of mortality—particularly, of young men dying before their time—and therefore sales picked up during the Boer War and, especially, the Great War.

A number of the Shropshire poems have been set to music; there are almost 50 different songs that use “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now” for lyrics.

Between their simple earnestness, melancholy bent, and wide literary renown, the poems lend themselves well to parody. You can get the gist of the entire collection from a few of the short spoofs. Pre-fascist Ezra Pound wrote a nice one, in 1911:

O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon.
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.

Hugh Kingsmill trod this same ground in 1920:

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean upstanding chap like you?

I cannot track down the full text, but “Loveliest of cheese, the Cheddar now,” by the pseudonymous Terence Beersay, made me chortle. Even Dorothy Parker, no comic slouch, took a whack at Housman:

I never see that prettiest thing—
A cherry bough gone white with Spring—
But what I think, “How gay t’would be
To hang me from a flowering tree.”

Housman claimed not to find any of the Shropshire parodies funny, which seems to me unlikely—although, being an academic who devoted most of his intellectual energy to Latin poetical scholarship, he wasn’t exactly Robin Williams with the jokes. From what I can gather, he was something of a fusspot.

But he was able to laugh at himself, or at least to recognize the prevailing darkness of his signature work. The penultimate poem in A Shropshire Lad, “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” attacks this head-on—as if Housman knows what the critics would say, and hits them with a preemptive strike. The text is a dialogue between Terence, who writes the depressing poems, and one of his friends, who is forced to read the depressing poems. Housman never tells us where they are when this exchange takes place, but I imagine them sitting at a pub, when, after a few pints of liquid courage, the friend offers some brutally honest criticism:

‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ‘tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ‘tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ‘tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

(The bit about the cow is a reference to lyrics of a song popular in Housman’s day, and thus made more sense in 1896. )

His buddy is saying, basically, “Dude, why so pouty? No one wants to read this depressing shit. I know you’re not really this much of a downer, because I see how you knock down the pints of ale. Maybe try writing something upbeat, that we can dance to.”

And Terence replies:

Why, if ‘tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?

Burton-on-Trent is the brewing capital of Britain—like referencing Milwaukee or Latrobe, PA or Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, Missouri. The “peers” he refers to next include, according to the footnote at The Housman Society, “Michael Arthur Bass, baron (1886) and Edward Cecil Guiness, baron (1891):”

Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,

And this alliterative couplet, comparing one of the greatest of British poets to beer, is chef’s kiss:

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.

But for all the magical powers of alcohol to improve our mood, drunkenness does not make the pain go away—not really:

Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ‘tis pleasant till ‘tis past:
The mischief is that ‘twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

The world is full of woe and rue, you see, and we are wise to prepare ourselves for the bad stuff that’s coming down the pike, not ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. Poetry helps accomplish this more effectively than pints of Bass or Guiness:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day….

In the fall of 2025—which, at the rate we’re going, might also wind up being the fall of the Republic—this strikes me as sound advice. Too many Americans are sleepwalking through the Trump horrors, and while this “antiwokeness” might keep them docile, it will not protect them from what’s coming. The newsfeed, meanwhile, is so toxic that we risk succumbing to its fascist poison. We must make like Mithradates and take it all in small doses….

Do read it all.